Over the past decades, the internationalization of higher education in China has had considerable achievements, and has contributed to the current transformation of the Chinese system into one of the largest and arguably most promising ones in the world. Setting the Chinese experience in an international context, this article assesses the latest developments. It argues that China's internationalization of higher education is part of a much larger process of cultural integration between China and the West. From this perspective, it concludes that although China's recent developments deserve to be noted, China has a considerable distance to go before its aspirations to create truly world-class universities are fulfilled.